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Pigs · room 5 of 6 · 1493 to now

Pigs in the Americas

From de Soto at Bradenton to razorbacks, hog drives, Porkopolis and the disassembly line.

The wild boarBecoming domesticPigs in EuropePigs in SpainPigs in the AmericasReality?
1600s to early 1900s

Razorbacks and the open range

historyeconomics

Claim: for most of Southern history, hogs ran free. Evidence: farmers notched their pigs' ears to mark ownership and let them forage in the woods; these lean, half-wild "razorbacks" fed much of the South until fence laws, passed county by county in the late 1800s and early 1900s, closed the open range.

Ask: who gained and who lost when the range was fenced?

Sources: Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, "The Antebellum Southern Herdsman," Journal of Southern History 41 (1975)
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
1820s to 1860s

Hog drives and Porkopolis

historyeconomicstrade & commercialization

Claim: Cincinnati became the pork capital of the world. Evidence: drovers walked hogs over roads to the Ohio River, where packers processed them and shipped barrels of salt pork downriver; by the 1840s Cincinnati packed more pork than any other city and was nicknamed "Porkopolis." Its packers moved carcasses past workers on an overhead line, each doing one task.

Ask: why did a river town become the center of the business?

Sources: Ohio History Central, "Porkopolis"
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
1830s to 1911

Lard, candles and soap

economicstrade & commercializationhistory

Claim: the fat of the pig built one of America's biggest companies. Evidence: lard was the main cooking and baking fat for most families, and packing-house fat also went into candles and soap. In 1837 a Cincinnati candle maker, William Procter, and a soap maker, James Gamble, joined to found Procter & Gamble, using fat from "Porkopolis"; in 1911 the same company launched Crisco, a vegetable shortening that began lard's long decline.

Ask: why did a meat city become a soap city? Trace one by-product from the pig to a store shelf.

Sources: Davis Dyer, Frederick Dalzell and Rowena Olegario, Rising Tide: Lessons from 165 Years of Brand Building at Procter & Gamble (Harvard Business School Press, 2004); Ohio History Central, "Porkopolis"
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
1860s to 1913

The disassembly line

historyeconomics

Claim: the meatpackers' line helped inspire the factory assembly line. Evidence: packing houses in Cincinnati and then Chicago moved animals along an overhead trolley while each worker made one cut. Henry Ford wrote in My Life and Work (1922) that his moving assembly line came partly from watching the overhead trolley Chicago packers used in dressing beef.

Ask: what did the worker gain and lose when the job became one repeated motion?

Sources: Henry Ford, My Life and Work (1922), Project Gutenberg
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
1800s to now

Pigskin: gloves, suede and the football

economicstrade & commercialization

Claim: the pig's hide became a useful leather. Evidence: pigskin is tough and porous, so it is used for work gloves, suede, shoe linings and book bindings; early American footballs were made from inflated pig bladders and later wrapped in leather, which is why the ball is still nicknamed the "pigskin," though today's balls are cowhide.

Ask: list three things in your house that might be made from animal hide. Which have plant or plastic replacements?

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Leather
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
Spanish descent, Georgia

Ossabaw Island hogs

biologyhistory

On Georgia's Ossabaw Island, pigs left by Spanish ships survived alone for about four centuries. Living on scarce food, they became small and able to store fat quickly, which makes them useful in studies of diabetes. They are one of America's rarest heritage breeds.

Isolation on an island makes a new kind of pig.

Sources: The Livestock Conservancy, Ossabaw Island hog
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
Now

Florida's feral hogs today

biologyeconomics

Feral hogs live in every one of Florida's 67 counties. They root up wetlands, compete with wildlife and damage crops; Florida treats them as livestock on private land and lets landowners hunt and trap them year-round. They are the descendants of Spanish and later farm pigs gone wild.

A living lesson in how a farm animal reshapes a landscape.

Sources: Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Wild hog
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
Today

Pork: a world market

economicstrade & commercialization

Claim: pork is one of the most eaten meats on Earth and a major traded good. Evidence: China raises and eats roughly half of the world's pigs; the United States, the European Union, Brazil and Canada are leading exporters, and a disease such as African swine fever, which spread through Chinese herds from 2018, can shake meat prices around the world.

Ask: how can a pig disease in one country change the price of a sandwich in Bradenton?

Sources: FAO, FAOSTAT livestock and trade data; World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), African swine fever
Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)
Watch and look

Picture gallery

Tap a picture to enlarge it. Every picture is public domain or openly licensed, credited below, and kept on our own server.

Giles Laurent · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Brisbane City Council · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0
A. J. T. Johnsingh, WWF-India and NCF · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Nrg800 · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
Michael Rivera · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
division, CSIRO · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 3.0
Sleeping_Guinea_Hog.jpg: abbamouse derivative work: SpinningSpark · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0
Drew Avery · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0
jude from Cambridge, MA, USA · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0
Drew Avery · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0
boliyou · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0
Carly & Art from Washington, DC · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0
Cliff from I now live in Arlington, VA (Outside Washington DC), USA · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0
Khamis Hammoudeh from Phoenix, Arizona, USA · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0
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